


Just Wash It Down The Drain

by Drindalis



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Blood and Gore, Descriptive Language of Injuries, Eddie Gets Stabbed In The Face, Extended Scene, F/M, IT Chapter Two Spoilers, Interdimensional Clown Demons Keep Ruining My Damn Reddie, M/M, Richie Is Present
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-20 22:21:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20682860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drindalis/pseuds/Drindalis
Summary: SPOILERS FOR IT CHAPTER TWO! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!"So, uh... Bowers' is in my room, you guys."Richie, Beverly, and Ben all discover an injured Eddie shortly after he has been stabbed by Henry Bowers outside the Townhouse room that he rented. They are Not Happy™.This scene plays out a little bit more intensely than it did in the movie so please mind the tags and proceed with caution!





	Just Wash It Down The Drain

**Author's Note:**

> Oh God I know, I know, I need to finish Sweet Sacrifice but dammit this plot bunny bit me and wouldn't let me go. 
> 
> So basically I loved It Chapter Two with my entire heart and soul but I really wished that the scene between Eddie and Bowers in the Townhouse had played out a bit differently. It felt like the scene was kind of rushed to get to the next big scare, instead of elaborating on the fact that our tiny smol Eddie boy had just stabbed Bowers with a knife he pulled out of HIS OWN FACE MY GOD.
> 
> So here's my self indulgent rewritten version of the scene, with a little more Reddie and a little more realistic portrayal of Eddie being a BOSS.

Eddie hummed idly to himself as he stepped into his room at the Townhouse, rubbing his hands together fitfully in an attempt to get clean again after being once again puked on by the leper. He toed the door shut behind him, hearing the distant and faint murmurs of Ben and Beverly echoing down the hallway. It was somewhat of a comfort to know that he wasn't alone here in Derry, even after facing his own personal demons back at the pharmacy. Eddie's fingertips probed slightly at the faint mole on his cheek, the same one Mr. Keene had poked and prodded at and announced that it might be cancer...or it might not be. 

He frowned as he squinted closer at his own reflection, huffing as the slight bump merely grew red the more he rubbed it. Finally Eddie let his fingertips fall from his own face and reached for his toothbrush. He desperately wanted to get the taste of sewage out of his mouth. His left hand slipped into his toiletry bag to pull out his toothpaste, and that was when he glanced up and locked eyes with Henry Bowers in the mirror. 

There was a glint of silver, a flash of Bower's hand, and then pain slammed into the left side of his face. Eddie screamed at once, feeling the knife scrape against molars and cut into the back of his tongue. He gagged once around the metallic taste of his own blood beginning to fill his mouth, and locked eyes with Henry in a sort of frozen disbelief. His hand shook violently as he raised it to his own face, grasping the icy cold hilt in his hand in a horrified sort of shock. 

Henry was laughing now, a deep sort of belly laugh that nearly left the escaped inpatient doubled over as he watched Eddie's blood began to leak out of the corners of his lips and drip down into his collar.

Eddie didn't know what else to do in this moment, trapped in the same bathroom as a madman. Had he seriously just been stabbed? And in the face? It didn't hurt nearly as bad as he expected it to. But was that because of the shock currently racing through his system, or was he just that pissed off that it didn't even register?

Henry spoke, then, spitting out something about Eddie being the _first,_ and then he was laughing again. It was as though the injury he had just caused was the most hilarious joke he'd ever been told. 

Eddie stood there in a horrified sort of awe, with a knife sticking out of his cheek, biting down on the blade of the knife wedged between his jaws while Henry's inane laughter echoed in his ears.

Henry watched with his piggy eyes alit with interest as he waited for Eddie to react.

Eddie didn't know what else to do, so he laughed, too.

He laughed while droplets of blood began to hit the pale white tile beneath his sneakers, even as his shaky footsteps began to stumble backwards, towards the bathtub. His giggles were more frantic, less of a genuine peal of laughter and more of a scared, uncertain sort of keening noise of pain. He could feel warmth beginning to pour down his chin in rivulets, could feel it beginning to stick to his shirt and plaster the fabric to his chest. Each beat of his heart thundered in his ears, reminding him distantly of Native American drumming.

Henry's laugh was different then, loud and booming and full of spite. He threw his head back with a hoot of victory, and he turned with Eddie as the two seemed to almost dance backwards towards the tub.

Eddie's trembling fingertips reached up slowly, creeping until he found a grip and began to draw the green shower curtain back. He just needed to hide, to get out of sight-

Henry just smirked, insanity glimmering in his eyes as he stepped forward, his laughter abruptly cutting off as soon as it had started. 

"How's the knife taste, Wheezy?" 

Eddie drew first one leg up, then the other, focusing only on moving each foot carefully over the lip of the tub. And still Henry didn't move, simply watching Eddie with eyes that seemed to glow almost yellow.

The asthmatic man shakily drew the shower curtain closed between them.

Two things happened very quickly, after that.

Henry lunged for the shower curtain and made as if to yank it back open.

Eddie's hands wrapped around the handle of the knife in his cheek and pulled. 

There was a small noise, a faint 'snick' followed by a soft wheeze and then a loud, instinctive curse of pain from Bowers.

Henry took a stumbling step back, the curtain seemingly pinned to his body. One by one, the hooks holding the curtain on the rack began to give way, revealing Henry's switchblade sticking handle deep out of his stomach. A faint red blossom began to flicker into existence on the green shower curtain, before blooming outward to leave a red stain along the former bully's gut. 

Neither of them were laughing anymore.

As Henry's eyes locked with Eddie's again, the shorter of the two began to tremble and shake as he began to inch his way out of the bathroom and towards the hallway. Each step felt slow and awkward, and the pain that he had been able to ignore while the adrenaline was flowing was now at the forefront of his mind. He didn't want to turn his back on Bowers, so he walked backwards with unsteady steps towards the door, keeping the bully's stunned expression in his sights.

"You should cut that fucking mullet, it's been like, thirty years, man."

He hadn't even realized he had spoken, but the quip came from the same place as every comeback he fired back at Richie over the years. It was just a reflex, but even the act of speaking caused the wound in his cheek to throb and sting with sharp, intense waves of heat.

Eddie gagged once, choking around the seemingly ceaselessly pouring blood that was leaking from his face. It was metallic tasting and rusty, and it just seemed to keep coming. Pulling the knife from his own cheek had been quick thinking back in the shower, but he had sliced the injury open further when shaky and bloody hands had tried desperately to pull it back out again. 

Once he got to the door, he found himself leaning heavily with his back against the wall to hold himself up. Up against a cool surface, he didn't have to worry about a bully or a clown sticking a knife in his back.

_'N-No, no, they wouldn't stab me in the back, why do that when they could just stab me in the fucking face-?!'_ Eddie thought somewhat hysterically. He was in shock, he could identify that now that the knife had been removed and he was inches away from safety, from his _friends-_

Eddie reached out to grasp the handle to his door with a trembling hand, idly noticing the touches of red along his fingertips that he left smeared along the brass. He tugged once, panic ratcheting up a few notches when the door didn't immediately open. Eddie almost immediately realized his mistake, forcing himself to swallow once _blood, blood, it tastes like fucking blood-!_ and turn the handle before trying to open the door again. This time it opened inward, towards him, with the faintest of clicks. He let out a shuddery sigh of relief, shoulders heaving slightly as he crept out in between the gap in the door and began to slowly slide down the wall into a kneeling position outside his room. Eddie didn't seem to notice, but he left a faint mark of shockingly shaded crimson along the wallpaper adorned with pictures of birds when he did so. 

The sharp noise of the opening of the door seemed to have caught Beverly, Ben, and Richie's attention where they chatted just down the hall. "Eddie?" Beverly called curiously, glancing up at the stairs above her as she heard the faint 'squeak' of the hinges of a door.

Her eyes darted to Ben's worriedly as she heard no response, before Richie shot past them both, bolting up the stairs as fast as his long, gangly legs could carry him. Beverly screamed as she caught sight of Eddie then, blood smeared across his face, dripping from his shirt, and running down his chin.

Eddie had sunk to his knees outside the door, curling his legs under him and shaking violently as his hand came up to cup his own cheek. There was a very telling red stain behind him along the wall, and the blood only continued to flow even as Eddie closed his throat and opened his mouth to let the blood leak out onto the carpet.

"Oh, fuck!" Richie hissed, skidding to a stop as he frantically dropped into a crouch next to his closest friend. His hands opened and closed somewhat vaguely, as though he was unsure of what he should be doing to stop the bleeding. "Eds, hey, Eds, what _happened!?_ Fucking _say something goddammit!"_

"So, uh....Bowers' in my room, you guys...." Eddie murmured under his breath. It was very telling that he hadn't even bothered to get after Richie about the dreaded nickname. He was still trembling violently even as Beverly joined the two of them and Ben stormed into Eddie's room. Clever brown eyes quickly darted from the bloodstain on the floor, the broken window, to the man outside the window who smirked up at him and yanked a switchblade from his stomach.

Ben grit his teeth and turned away from the window even as the insane man down below hopped into a familiar blue Trans AM and drove away. There was nothing they could do about Bowers right now, not without completely neglecting Eddie's injury. That was something that Ben refused to do. He rejoined the small huddle outside the asthmatic man's room, letting his hand rest on Beverly's shoulder as she tucked a red curl behind her own ear and tried to calm Eddie down. 

Richie himself seemed equally if not more panicked than Eddie was, answering his previous statement with incredulity in his voice. "What the fuck do you mean, Bowers is in your room?! Haystack, h-he can't be, right? He can't be..." He trailed off as his dark brown eyes caught with Ben's hazel ones, the architect thinning his lips into a line and nodding his head once in confirmation.

"He took off out the window...I don't know what exactly happened in there, but...Bowers had a knife sticking out of his gut. Must have happened in the scuffle." Ben relayed, bending down into a crouch and shedding his jacket to begin to mop up some of the blood. Eddie made a noise as if protesting Ben's comment, but was cut off by Richie turning his head back towards him so he could see the injury better.

Beverly's expression twisted into one of muted anger as she realized that it was Bowers who had once again stepped in to stir up trouble, just as he had so often in their childhoods. The expression faded into one of belated relief, her arms coming up to tug Eddie closer to her chest regardless of the blood that was being smeared along her blouse. It didn't matter, this was _Eddie._ One of the Seven. 

One of Them.

Ben glanced from Beverly to Richie, before his eyes landed back on Eddie. "What's his condition, Richie?" None of them had any idea how extensive Eddie's injuries really were. Had Bowers managed to stick him somewhere? Or was it just the mere scratch on his cheek? There was a lot of blood, but some of it must have been Bowers'...right?Eddie seemed really scared, though, shaken up in a way that a simple cut just wouldn't do.

Richie gave a somewhat incredulous noise even as his fingertips, careful and unsure, probed around the injury to try and gauge how deep it went while Eddie stiffened and tried to pull away from him halfheartedly. "Condition? Well, Ahm no doctah, good sirree, an' there's a lo' of blood, but this looks like it really isn't so.... bad... ?"

His fingertip had slipped right through the wound in Eddie's cheek and straight into his mouth. That hard thing his fingernail was scraping against, that was Eddie's fucking _molar,_ and wasn't that enough to snap him right out of any Voice in an instant?

Richie's mind raced faster than perhaps it ever had before, neurons firing and electricity crackling in the air as he came to the sickening and heart-stopping realization that Bowers had taken the chance and had stabbed Eddie right in the fucking face. 

And even with all of the living Losers together, it hadn't been enough to stop one of them from getting hurt. 

_'We haven't even headed for the fucking sewers yet!'_

Eddie shot Richie a scared and unsure look, as though waiting for the confirmation that he was Injured. As long as he didn't think about it too hard, didn't analyze why his pain receptors were firing into overdrive, didn't question the blood that seemed to flow from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, then he was Okay. 

Not Injured.

Safe.

Richie pulled his hand back and noticed with a sort of sick realization that there was a faint river of red running down the back of his hand from Eddie's cheek. 

Ben and Beverly seemed to have caught on to Richie's fear and they both spoke up at once, talking over each other.

"What is it, Richie?"

"Oh, God, is it bad?"

"Why is he bleeding so much?"

Surprisingly, Eddie was the one who cut them off, his left hand having come up to cover the stab wound in his cheek. "B-Because B...Buh...." He paused to spit more blood out of his mouth, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand and furrowing his brow in mild disgust when he spotted the smear left on his hand. "Because Bowers took a cheap shot and stabbed me in the face."

Hearing it confirmed only made Richie feel worse for not being there. He knew realistically he couldn't be in two places at once, couldn't have gone back to the Capitol Theater and found his token at the same time as being with Eddie to find his. He shouldn't blame himself for this.

He shouldn't, but he did.

Beverly looked murderous, her fingers expertly tearing a strip of fabric from the bottom of her blouse and gently covering the wound. Eddie gave a faint hiss of pain and she winced in sympathy. "Sorry, Eddie. Sorry." She wasn't just apologizing for the pain of his injury, she was apologizing for not being there. Ben nodded in agreement at her words, looking remorseful as he pulled out his cell phone in one shaking hand and began to dial the Derry Hospital.

Eddie reached up and brushed his hand over where Bev's was pushing the fabric against his wound. "It's not your fault, you guys. Bowers...he... he said something about me... being the first. I think his plan was to just... keep going once he was finished with me. Move onto the next room and just-" Eddie cut himself off, shaking his head stubbornly. "I couldn't let that happen, I _couldn't!"_ he insisted forcefully.

Something was beginning to form in Richie's mind, some sort of suspicious realization that was being supported by each little hint Eddie gave towards what had really transpired in the bathroom of the Townhouse. All at once he began to see the shorter man in a whole new light. Eddie had been attacked, yes, but instead of simply curling up and becoming easy prey, he had fought back, fought back hard enough to escape with his own life intact.

"The knife didn't slip in the scuffle, did it? You..._you_ stabbed Bowers. On purpose." Richie breathed, eyes wide behind his framed glasses. 

He didn't even realize that was the conclusion he had come to when he spoke. Ben and Beverly whirled on him in an instant, disbelief in their eyes. They hadn't seemed to yet realize what Richie already had: Eddie may be psychosomatic, he may be a germaphobe of the worst kind, but he was NOT about to let Henry kill his friends. Even if it meant tearing a knife out of his own flesh and using that very same weapon against his attacker. 

"What? No way, Eddie wouldn't-"

"Wait, what are you saying, Rich?"

Eddie spoke up, then, cutting them all off. 

"Yes, Richie. _I_ stabbed Bowers. He was coming for me, for you _all,_ and he... He wasn't going to stop. Not until we were _all_ dead...or he was." His voice didn't tremble or shake when he spoke. It was like out of all the things he was trying to say, none of them mattered nearly as much as getting this message across. 

Ben's intelligent hazel eyes darted from Eddie, to Richie, to Bev, and then finally back to Eddie. "Wait, wait _wait_ a second, you said Henry stabbed you in the face? Then...how did you get the knife? Like...how did the knife go from being in your face to...in between Bowers' ribs?"

Richie's stomach twisted with dread before Eddie even said the words. 

"I, uh. I crawled into the bathtub and drew the shower curtain so he couldn't see what I was doing. Then I reached up and....just kind of. You know...pulled it out."

"YOU PULLED A FUCKING KNIFE OUT OF YOUR OWN GODDAMN _FACE?!"_ Richie exploded in disbelief, grabbing Eddie's shoulders in his hands and shaking him. "Are you screwing with me right now? Because that is so not fucking funny, Kaspbrak. There is _no fucking way_ that you stabbed Bowers with the knife you just yanked out of your own head. You did _not."_

Eddie blinked for a moment to put his finger on his chin as if in mock thought, before breaking out into slightly hysterical laughter. "Uh, yeah, pretty sure I did, Trashmouth." 

Richie looked past Eddie with mime incredulity on his features to Beverly and Ben. "Are you _hearing this?!_ My little Spaghetti Man's all grown up and takin' names! It's enough to put a tear in 'ole Richie Tozier's eye, by Lord howdy I sweah-!" He helped Eddie to his feet slowly, making sure the abrupt change in elevation didn't cause his head to spin from blood loss or anything. The shorter of the two didn't seem to realize it, but he was leaning on Richie for support as the four Losers began to head downstairs, to wait for the ambulance.

Beverly couldn't hold back the faint smile that was creeping over the corners of her lips, glancing at Eddie and Richie, having fallen straight back into the same antics they always had when they were kids. 

Even after everything they had gone through while they were apart, not even Bowers or his infamous switchblade was able to sever the connection between the Loser's Club.

That would be left to IT, of course, in the upcoming hours, but they had no way of knowing that Eddie's remaining seconds of life had already begun to tick downwards rapidly with each deliberate step of muddy sneakers towards the sewers. 

_They didn't know._


End file.
